*Everyday Chatter

The New World Order has been dying to erase Astor Place from the map for some time now. This winter, cloaked in "good for the hood" exhortations and watercolor paintings of vegetation-lush pedestrian malls, it begins. For the record, crossing Astor Place is a piece of cake--there's very little traffic--if you know how. [Curbed]

Yes, Gothamist, I have indeed noticed that taxi TVs are NOT turning off. In two rides, I discovered the same awful trend. The first screen has a red OFF button. If you touch anywhere else on the screen, except for that OFF button, you get immediately sent to a deeper, inescapable level of Hell, in which there is no OFF button. And from there, you're screwed. The damn thing plays and plays and plays...and what does it play? Condo ads:


David Kamp, originator of Vongerichtified, tells a fascinatingly twisted tale of urban Googling, accordion-playing aunties from Queens, iPod silhouette models, scruffy hipsters, and the cherry-poppin' Fay Leshner Memorial "Sex Bench" in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. [DKamp]

Speaking of sex benches, check out this deal: IKEA BOOBSHELF for sale in the East Village. At 52" wide, 79" high, and 17" deep, that's a shelf that can support one big boob:


Is the Cup and Saucer as doomed as it looks? Urbanite is worried and so am I. [Urbanite]

Alex in NYC tells Starbucks, "Seeya, wouldn't wanna be ya," and wonders why all the sobbing? [FP]

The 6 and 12 Cafe (at 6th and 12th) is closed. I've had a feeling about this place for a while now. Always loved these signs. I snapped this pic and a week later, it was gone. Not my fault, I swear. They "closed for retirement":

*Everyday Chatter

Remember the old "it's better than a Starbucks" rationale for embracing Varvatos on the Bowery? Well, it has spread to CB3, as members invoke the "magic words" that allow more and more frat-boy bars into the EV/LES. [SLES]

Those Sex and the City tours have finally given the people of Perry Street a break and scratched "Carrie's stoop" from their route. Still, the tour creator is upset. Also worth noting, Bleecker Playground is “'an absolute hellhole' due to another Sex and the City tour side effect--cupcake liners strewn on the ground." Says one resident of the tours, “First of all, it’s pointless and stupid... It is such a failure of imagination. Why would people visiting New York City waste their time with a fake location on TV?” [Villager]

At least one New Yorker has named her baby after the Magnolia bakery. Will it become a trend? [NYer]

"Parker came to symbolize an image of New York City over the last 10 years as a place of conspicuous consumption and carefree frivolity...Now, with reports of Broderick out with a woman half his age he met at a bar, and Parker running around town frantically searching for him, some are wondering if the New York of Sex and the City is officially over." [AMNY]

Heartening news (to some): Transgender sex workers are returning to the West Village, now playfully known as "Times Square South." [Villager]

Take a look inside the doomed Frankie & Johnnies of Times Square. And "meow" to you, Miss Meriweather. [GVDP]

Go for a ride on New York's still-spinning carousels. [BBs]

Thrift

Readers of this blog might assume I am against wealth and spending. This is not so. What I find troublesome is the current culture of financial decadence that is wasteful, hostile, and destructive. Raised in a lower-middle/working class home where government cheese was on the menu, I certainly aim to achieve personal wealth. I enjoy earning and saving money, and even like to go shopping--sometimes at chain stores (a few is okay--it's the over-proliferation of chains that troubles me).

But I also believe in being thrifty and living within one's means. I seem to be in the minority these days.


I Love Money: Meet the cast

In a recent New York Times, David Brooks offered an enlightening Op Ed about money in America and the current "deterioration of financial mores" that has led to a culture of debt and stark polarization into the "investor class" and the "lottery class." To those who argue that New York, and the U.S. as a whole, has always been about extreme commerce and consumerism uber alles, take a look at Brooks' piece, in which he writes:

"The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal. Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded... the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence."


WATCH: "We are a nation of consumers. And there's nothing wrong with that..."

In last Sunday's Times, they added to their Debt Trap series and again showed that America was not always ruled by a culture of unbridled consumption: "Just two generations ago, America was a nation of mostly thrifty people living within their means, even setting money aside for unforeseen expenses. Today, Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt." And the average American saves about 400 bucks a year. We haven't saved so little since the Great Depression.


the American Way of Debt map

Our most dramatic plunge into consumer debt spans the 2000s. I often wonder why 9/11 seemed to give a boost to the city's hyper-gentrification, Vongerichtification, yunnie-ism--and I think the reasons are manifold (Bloomberg, Bush, war, fear, etc.), but also remember the regrettable "Fight Back NY!" campaign that told people the way to fight terrorism was to "Go Shop!" and "Spend Money!" What terrible advice, and yet it set the tone for the post-9/11 era.

Those in power would like us to believe that consumerism is the golden good and thrift is for greedy cheapskates. As David Brooks wrote in yesterday's follow-up Op Ed, "Norms changed and people began making jokes to make illicit things seem normal. Instead of condemning hyper-consumerism, they made quips about 'retail therapy.'" Thrift, in contrast, becomes the butt of the joke.



But the "word 'thrift' comes from 'thrive,'" writes David Blankenhorn in the Philadelphia Enquirer, "Understood in this way, thrift is the ethic and practice of best use. Being thrifty means making the wisest use of all that we have--time, money, our possessions, our health, and our society’s natural resources--to promote both our own flourishing and the social good."

Ethics, mores, social good. These values are part of New York's history, too. And they are not antithetical to affluence. "Affluence" means abundant flow. And flow is a good thing. But affluence in America has come to be all about conspicuous consumption. That's not flow.



Brooks points us to the New Thrift movement, which has some problematic aspects--like the whole creepy right-wing "defense of marriage" stuff and, let's face it, the Puritans jacked up the country in many, many ways--but their central message is a critical one: "consumerism as a philosophy of life" is unethical, immoral, and detrimental to the country's (and the city's) health.

Under the leadership of BloomBush, our city pushed forward into an age of unethical greed. New York has been corrupted by the type of wealth that devours everything in its path, sparing nothing but that which encourages it, and hiding in its dark heart an emptiness, a yawning debt disguised as success. But every day there is more good news. Maybe the tide is finally turning. Do you feel it too? Fight back NY! Save money!

*Everyday Chatter

New blog in town: In BoweryBoogie, a Lower East Sider jumps on the blog bandwagon and here looks at the correlation between dogshit and gentrification.

Empower Jim Power! Looks like the Mosaic Man has a new website and blog. He is also in need of funds. [EJP]

What we lose when we lose mom-and-pops: community connections. Here, the old New Barber Shop on 9th and 18th puts up an announcement about a death in the neighborhood and info about the funeral. Chains, condos, and upscale restaurants don't do that:


Penmanship, the restaurant to replace Kurowycky Meats on 1st Ave between 7th and 8th in the EV, was approved for its liquor license "with provisos about closing early and keeping the noise level low." Here's what we might expect, from the same owner. [Eater]

I reported on the closing of Grace & Hope Mission this past spring. Today we hear it's turning into a frat-boy bar. [Curbed]

Chelsea's getting yet another 20-story condo-hotel tower. [Curbed]

35 Cooper Square

As the Cooper Square Hotel has risen and spread, it has engulfed the block of Bowery between 5th and 6th Streets. Two original buildings remain: the tenement home of poet Hettie Jones and 35 Cooper Square, a building with a long and interesting history.

That history has been painstakingly uncovered by artist and East Village resident Sally Young in an attempt to get #35 landmarked, thus saving it from the wrecking ball. Rumor has it, the hotel developers plan to have the building demolished. And Landmarks has turned Sally down, stating, "the property does not meet the criteria for designation."


photo: sally young, 2008

Originally called 391 Bowery, #35 was owned in the early 1800s by Nicholas William Stuyvesant, great-grandson of Peter Stuyvesant. When he died in 1833, the building passed through several hands, including an undertaker, a teacher, a hotelier, and a saloon owner.


my flickr

In the 20th century, it became a home for artists. Painter and photographer J. Forrest Vey lived there after WWII. He rented the upstairs dormer rooms for $5 apiece to people like Joel Grey, star of Cabaret, and Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land.

Mr. Vey once broke into the attic, which had been sealed ever since a man hanged himself there. He found Civil War newspapers, a stove-pipe hat, a sign that said "5-cent Hot Whiskey," and a noose.


found in the attic

Beat poet Diane DiPrima moved into #35 in 1962. There she wrote many poems, and her memories of the place can be found in her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman. She writes to Sally, "We were visited there by probably hundreds of artists and art patrons, including William Burroughs, Cecil Taylor, Frank O’Hara," John Weiners, Herbert Huncke, and Warhol Superstar Billy Name, who lived with DiPrima for a time.

Billy Name recalled in an email to Sally, "wooden broad plank floors and a very comfortable homey feeling from all the wood and open space and kitchen. and, as opposed to all the tenement buildings in its surrounds it actually looked like a 'house' from earlier america. looked and felt like it might have been the perfect home for walt whitman...it should be designated a historic site and have a nice bronze plaque on the front."

Finally, the building made it into the news in 2004 (The Villager and the Times) when owner Cooper Union opted to paint over a 9/11 memorial mural and make room for advertising, against protests from the locals.


photo: hubert j. steed, 2004

The memorial has been erased and there won't be any bronze plaques. There probably won't even be a building to hang it on. #35 is one of a few lots on the block bought last year by a group of Cooper Square Hotel investors. One investor told The Observer, “These lots were to become, possibly, a restaurant-lounge and/or expansion to the Cooper hotel so we (Cooper investors) would be able to leverage the brand, amenities and staff of the Cooper Hotel next door."

In her memoir, DiPrima wrote, "From the moment when I first laid eyes on 35 Cooper Square, I knew it was the fulfillment of all those fantasies of art and the artist's life, la vie de boheme, harking all the way back to my high school years or before."

What will happen to such fantasies--and their dreamers--when all the 35 Cooper Squares of our city have been demolished and New York fails, again and again, to fulfill them?

*Everyday Chatter

The 10th Street Block Association is praying the Canadians who bought Commerce Bank will save them from "excessive and garish signage." But I doubt the Canucks can do much about the proliferation of petty nuisance crime on the street:


Read this interview with the anonymous blogger behind the funny-sad satirical StuyTownLuxLiving, about which "Management is not amused." [Times]

New, super-chic bar on the LES will have butlers and only let in "quality people"--it will also be disguised as a "new and used" bookstore. Remember those places? We used to have lots of real ones around here. [Grub St.] (Check out the Eater comments.)

Yuppies, yunnies, and now yupres: "new and temporary arrivals" who will eventually go "shuffling off to middle America, suburbia or Los Angeles. Despite this, they define the (cultural) economy of New York." [Ventriloquism] via [Gawker]

How can we stop the flood of condos and chains? Pirate up! Hey, it works in Everglades City, Florida. [Yahoo]

Everybody wants a piece of the luxury action, including the condo that replaced the Cedar Tavern, despite its being a veritable Fedders box--here it gets its luxe banner on:

Harlem Mall

Earlier this month, The Real Deal reported that several of the small businesses at 125th and Frederick Douglass Blvd have settled their lawsuit against Kimco Realty, who plans to demolish the entire block of low-rise buildings and replace them with a big-box shopping mall. There were 16 tenants evicted by the Kimco plan--many of them, including Bobby's Happy House, have already closed.

The block, once filled with life, is now half dead.


formerly bobby's

I went to 125th Street last fall, when Bobby's was still there. It was a chilly day, but there was a crowd out front of the 61-year-old business. In the window, a television showed Michael Jackson in his prime, and men were dancing along with him, mimicking his steps on the sidewalk. Bobby's closed on Martin Luther King's birthday this year.

Today, the store is boarded up. The awning is down, revealing an old sign from a shoestore with an angry boot called "boss" who looks ready to kick someone. Bobby moved to this site about 20 years ago, after Kentucky Fried Chicken booted him from his corner spot.


city high sports

Next door, in the window of former apparel store City High Sports, African-American mannequins lay in naked pieces, in piles of arms and legs, torsos dismembered. The beauty supplier and the nail salon have also had their faces ripped off. Soon, the rest of the businesses, from Manna's soul food to Roti Plus and the House of Seafood, will be gone.


formerly beauty supply, formerly spatz furniture

What will come, we can well imagine. Everyone knows what a brand-new shopping mall looks like. And feels like. There probably won't be middle-aged men moonwalking out in front of it.

• Photos of Bobby's Happy House
• Harlem flickr set